Armando Cossutta

Armando Cossutta (2 September 1926-14 December 2015) was an Italian communist politician and the founder of the Communist Refoundation Party and the Party of Italian Communists.

Biography
Armando Cossutta was born in Milan, Italy on 2 September 1926, and he joined the Italian Communist Party in 1943 before taking part in the World War II Italian Resistance as a partisan. After World War II, he became the leader of the most pro-Soviet tendency in the party, and he received $2,000,000 from the Soviet government for propaganda reasons during the 1980s, as well as serving as a KGB spy. In 1991, Cossutta, Sergio Garavini, Nichi Vendola, and some other PCI leaders creating the Communist Refoundation Party rather than join the Democratic Party of the Left, but he went on to found the Party of Italian Communists in 1996 after Fausto Bertinotti took over the PRC. Cossutta served as a member of parliament and a member of the European Parliament from 1999 to 2004. He died on 14 December 2015 in Rome at the age of 89.